My creative writing students and I get along well. We don’t see eye-to-eye on every story and poem we read, but that’s good and normal. But there is a topic that always seems to elicit an argument with a student or two—not a knock-down-drag-out (we save that for our fights over the use of exclamation points) but a topic that…
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American Life in Poetry sent this lovely Barbara Crooker poem to my inbox. It’s full of beautiful imagery, moving metaphors, and effective line breaks. But what caught my attention and what I want to comment on is the title… And Now It’s September, and the garden diminishes: cucumber leaves rumpled and rusty, zucchini felled by borers, tomatoes sparse on the…
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Michael Crichton famously said (although he wasn’t the first to say it), “Books aren’t written, they’re rewritten.” This idea that a piece of writing becomes the best version of itself, maybe even a new version of itself, in the process of revision is as true for blog posts as it is for bestsellers. Rather than finishing your first draft, tinkering…
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I was watching an episode of The Voice last night and I was thinking how the job of those singers and the job of a writer is pretty much the same. You’ve got a hot minute—less than a minute—to create some sort of experience your audience wants. Contestants on The Voice start out by auditioning “blind”. They sing while the…
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Let me be clear that I do not think that writers need to submit their work to literary magazines. First of all, some of you are writing books, and not the shorter fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry that most journals publish. Secondly, publishing is not the end-all-be-all. Who cares if you ever publish your work? It’s worth writing for plenty…
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